In many respects this seems a natural decision for a former geography teacher who loves nothing better than the long train journeys demanded by her somewhat vague work. But it is still a bold move: Xiao may spend a great deal of time away from home, but she always returns. “I like to travel,” she tells a blind man named Cricket, riding in the same train carriage as her. “Making a journey is the same as clinging to one place. If you settle down in your hometown, it feels instead as though you are drifting along.”

With her husband in prison, however, she no longer sees any impediment to joining her (unrequited) lover, Dr Liu, in his hometown of Nest. A quest to find someone, Xiao learns, is “a good reason to travel”.

Her extraordinary students quickly disabuse Xiao of her assumptions that Nest is a backwater: they know far more about their lessons than she does. And by doing so, they show there are more imaginative and profound voyages than the merely geographic. As Little Rose informs her: “Teacher, every day I can come to the garden to travel. There’s a little world right here.” Little Rose explains that phoenix-tail ferns travel by means of their roots; gardenias and Cape jasmine by means of their scent. Xiao is left wondering what kind of place she has moved to, “both open to the world and sealed off from it”. Readers might find themselves entertaining similar thoughts about Can’s novel, which feels realistic and wilfully eccentric often in the same sentence.

Wilderness

Soul Mountain (1990) by Gao Xingjian

If your idea of getting away from it all is literally getting away from it all, then Soul Mountain, by Gao Xingjian, is the novel for you. Its central protagonist, You, is a “city reject”, like the bus that transports him out of his hometown on a mission to find spaces unspoilt by any human.

A chance encounter with a stranger on a train sets him off towards fabled Lingshan mountain, in part because it rises in the midst of a vast wilderness, but mainly because it may not actually exist. This same stranger helpfully translates Lingshan (“ling meaning spirit or soul, and shan meaning mountain”) before scribbling directions on a cigarette packet. You can find it at the source of the You River, which in English provides a somewhat unsubtle reminder that journeys are inner and outer. Gao may evoke his fictional wilderness in sensual detail, but it is always suggestive of a figurative quest for “an end without an end”, which can be interpreted variously as essential individual­ity, the infinite and possibly death.

The “pain and humiliation” of this fictional expedition sprang from Gao himself. In 1983, he abandoned Beijing and headed into the mountains of Sichuan province. His despair was twofold. No stranger to seeing his experimental stories censored, Gao was effectively banned during the “oppose spiritual pollution” campaign. A subsequent diagnosis of lung cancer (incorrect as it turned out) was the final straw. Gao literally ran for the hills where, in near solitude, he rediscovered the personal autonomy that had been gradually eroded by the state. In 1987, he left China for good, taking an unfinished novel, Lingshan, with him. Soul Mountain was published in 1990 and, a decade later, in 2000, it helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Soul Mountain dramatises a personal crisis in ways that are by turns moving, unnerving and absurd: see the old man whose Zen-like sense of direction proposes that Lingshan is always on the opposite side of the river. Similar paradoxes infuse our hero’s hard-won philosophical accom­modation with society: “To exist and yet not to be perceived is not the same as to exist.” Seclusion might promise peace but also engenders loneliness: before long, our hero is driven to invent voices to keep him company. Having abandoned humanity, he learns he is not ready to leave it just yet: “I am still seduced by the human world, I still haven’t lived enough.”

Hotels

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (2009) by Jamie Ford

While some holidaymakers want to visit Soul Mountain, others seek more intense versions of society – on a cruise ship, in a holiday park or, perhaps, at a hotel. In some of the planet’s supposedly most luxurious destinations – Dubai, for example – hotels are just about the beginning and end of the entertainment.

The hotel in American writer Jamie Ford’s 2009 best­seller is inspired by a real-life equivalent: the Panama Hotel in Seattle, built in 1910 by the city’s first Japanese-American architect, Sabro Ozasa.

Its main claim to fame, however, was not its designer nor even its guests, but rather what they left behind. During World War II, the Panama became a refuge and even a sanctuary for Seattle’s Asian population. Following United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, authorising the internment of US citizens with Japanese ancestry, those sent to the camps began to store their most precious belongings in the hotel’s basement.

This is true of Ford’s heroine, Keiko, a 12-year-old Japanese girl, whose sudden evacuation shatters a star-crossed friendship-romance with Henry Lee, whose father proudly pins a badge declaring “I am Chinese” onto his son’s lapel. Ford’s hotel dramatises America’s enduring racial divides: between Japanese and Chinese commu­nities, and between white America and, well, just about everyone else.

In 1985, a new owner restored the actual Panama to its pre-war glory and transformed the basement, where so many Japanese families stored their belongings, into a de facto museum featuring artefacts from their unclaimed luggage. Thirty years later, in 2015, the Panama was offici­ally declared a national treasure. How times change.

The world beneath our feet

Underland (2019) by Robert Macfarlane

Whether you love potholing (or to use its vivid American alternative, spelunking) in Wookey Hole, in Britain, explor­ing Zhijin Cave, in Guizhou province, or visiting the cata­combs in Paris, going underground can be an unforget­table, if nerve-jangling holiday pursuit. There are few better guides than Underland, the new book by Britain’s acclaimed landscape writer Robert Macfarlane. “We know so little of the world beneath our feet,” he writes at the start of chapter one, aptly titled “Descending”.

The range, both geographic and thematic, of his travels is impressive. There are the ancient burial grounds in Britain’s Mendip hills: “To be human means above all to bury,” Macfarlane writes, quoting Robert Pogue Harrison. He follows the underground rivers that form unstable karst landscapes in Italy, Yunnan and Guizhou (Zhijin is a karst cave). And he investigates the vast underbelly of Paris, whose ever-changing catacombs are only the start of this most subterranean city.

Paris, Macfarlane notes, was largely built by quarrying its own limestone “underland”, creating in the process a vast network of covert rooms, chambers and galleries – les vides de carrieres (quarry voids) – beneath nine city arrondissements. Running beneath Macfarlane’s own prose, elegantly connecting place, time, death and survival, is a global warning about how the underlands in, say, the glaciers of Greenland, both measure and signal the environmental crisis that has enveloped our planet.

Come fly with me

Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) by Richard Bach

Many holidays begin with us humans departing our usual habitat on the ground and reaching for the sky in a clumsy and somewhat grotesque parody of birds: grotesque, because there are few more damaging things our species can do than buy an aeroplane ticket. Taking off can be alarming in more ways than the environmental: apparently 6.5 per cent of people fear flying, although that percentage can rise to 70 per cent if we replace “fear” with “feel nervous about”. Given the 21st-century traveller’s nonchalance about airports and airliners, I suspect just as many feel bored, which is a shame as not so long ago flying was both glamorous and thrilling.

Few novels have captured this thrill and humanity’s yearning for it better than Richard Bach’s bestseller, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. First published, appropri­ately enough, in Flying magazine, this influential slice of self-help fiction follows the adventures of our titular hero, a seagull, whose passion for flight leads to exile from his avian flock. Free of their restraining influence, Jonathan expands and deepens his philosophy of flying for flying’s sake and ascends towards seagull enlightenment.

As with Soul Mountain, the story is essentially an extended allegory of the human experience: a hymn to individualism, fighting conformity, seeking perfection and, once attained, learning to forgive the sceptics by sharing our new-found knowledge.

One small, grimly ironic footnote. In 2014, Bach published a new edition of the novel, complete with a fourth section that he had written more than 40 years earlier. The reason? A close brush with death after Bach’s own small plane crashed in Washington state. Luckily, he lived to tell, and republish, the tale.

Climb every mountain

The Last Quarter of the Moon(2005) by Chi Zijian

Like Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, The Last Quarter of the Moon would suit the wilderness, the cold, or the humid monsoon weather of Inner Mongolia’s brief summer. The reason Chi Zijian’s 2005 masterpiece (brilliantly translated into English by Bruce Humes, in 2013) is ideal mountaintop literature owes much to the Evenki people of northern China and Russia, whose modern history shapes the novel.

Mountains provided the Evenks with home, work and food (all three involving reindeer) and in the process became central to their culture, art and religion. These intersect in 12 wooden figurines, carved from trees in the Evenki’s homeland, which represent their ancestral spirits: “This gave me faith that if they could really protect us, our happiness must lie within the mountain forests, not elsewhere.”

As this hints, the love for the highlands that Chi evokes is made all the more poignant by imminent and actual loss. Her narrator is a 90-year-old matriarch, who is clear-eyed about the beauty and brutality of her home: her advanced years are an anomaly in Evenk society, as the early deaths of both her husbands attest. Indeed, even the most ardent citizen needs a break from the landscape’s austere glories. Take the restless Irina, who regularly flees to a nearby city, but never for long. Absence certainly makes her heart grow fond: “It’s wonderful to come back to the mountains, [to] sleep at night with stars in my eyes, hear the wind, and fill my eyes with mountains, brooks, flowers and birds,” she says.

China’s reindeer people: a Hongkonger helps revive lost way of life

But the stark reality facing the tribe means Irina will soon be deprived of even this polarised choice. The Evenks are slow­ly being driven (or tempted) from the mountains, and dis­placed into the “white walled, red-topped houses” of the nearby town, Busu. Having survived the Japanese invasion of China during World War II, they cannot withstand the unstoppable march of modernity: the combined force of the logging industry, local politicians such as Secretary Gu and the accelerating erosion of their homeland.

Only a couple of hundred Evenks are holding out, including our matriarchal nonagenarian, who watches another few truckloads of her people descend towards Busu. What her moving swan song makes clear is the imminent loss of her elevated way of life has only sharpen­ed her passion: “I won’t sleep in a room where I can’t see the stars. All my life I’ve spent the night in their company,” she laments. Sadly, she will be among the last of her people to realise this ambition.

Walk in the woods

Shinrin-Yoku: The Art and Science of Forest-Bathing (2018) by Dr Qing Li

Forests traditionally are a source of emotional repair. Poets from ancient China (see Qu Yuan’s Ju Song, in praise of the orange tree) to the 20th century have found consolation, and even transcendence, in watching, listening to and even hugging a branch or attractive tree trunk. “The trees are coming into leaf/Like something almost being said,”British poet Philip Larkin wrote, before wistfully rhyming “leaf” with “grief”.

Li prefers the playwright Zeami Motokiyo when evoking the feeling one can get “[wandering] in a huge forest with­out thought of return”. Quite whether he needed another 320 pages to explain this further is not only open to question, but possibly a waste of a good tree.

Story of home

The Woman Who had Two Navels (1961) by Nick Joaquin

Filipino writer Nick Joaquin lived in Hong Kong for only two years, after an early essay, “La Naval de Manila”, earned him a scholarship to study at St Albert’s Dominican semi­nary, on Rosary Hill. But it suffuses arguably his most famous work, the 1961 novella The Woman Who had Two Navels.

Hong Kong provided Joaquin with his first taste of life out­side the Philippines. While the privations and discipline of the seminary (along with a bout of homesickness) eventu­ally overwhelmed the young Nick, he was (so his nephew Tony writes in a biography) “captivated by the strange forms, the colour, the hills, the ferries plying the bay that separated Hong Kong from Kowloon”. On Sundays, he would use his day off to explore “the Tiger Balm Gardens, Happy Valley […] or just hike through the hillside, picking the fruit off blackberry trees that grew around so abundantly”.

These sights return in Joaquin’s story, in which Dr Pepe Monson listens to a tall tale told by Connie, a recently married woman convinced she has two navels. Born in Hong Kong to Filipino parents, Monson longs to visit Manila, but is prevented by his father, who fled the city after joining both the revolution against Spain and the resistance against the Americans. “[He] swore not to go home, neither himself nor his sons, until it was a free country again.”

Filipino writer Catherine Torres’ anthology beautifully written and relevant

Joaquin’s wistful affection for Hong Kong’s natural beauty is palpable in the many scenes describing Monson staring out of windows. This act of recreation is most obvious when heavy fog forces him to imagine the view of Hong Kong in midwinter from Kowloon side: “the harbour, gay with junks and ferry-boats; of the downtown buildings standing up in white ranks across the water, in the noon sun, the island’s rock delicately ostentatious behind them, with toylike houses necklacing various peaks or stacked up the slopes or snuggling into private niches down the sides”.

This tender recreation of absent people and places strikes deeper thematic chords within the story. A memory of Monson’s dead mother intertwines with reminiscences of swimming in Deep Water Bay: “a fleet of junks along the shore and the bathers were mostly dowdy families like their own: English, Chinese, Portuguese – Deep Water, in spite of its elegant white sand, is not fashionable; its currents and changing levels are too dangerous”.

Contained inside this memory is another: of Manila, as recalled yearningly by Monson’s father, whose temporary exile in Hong Kong has lasted for so long that his own home in Manila no longer exists. His son, ironically, can picture this house he has never seen more vividly than any he has lived in.

The curious ways in which one location melts into another can be interpreted as a nuanced portrait of colonialism, capitalism and cultural exchange. American jazz fuels Hong Kong’s post-war cabaret boom, which in turn inspires a Chinese millionaire to open Hong Kong jazz clubs in Manila. Most of all, it reminds us of art’s power to evoke times and places that, like Hong Kong’s harbour concealed by fog, have long since vanished from view.

Tomorrow’s world

This is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook (2019)

If these ploys grabbed your attention in a good way, you may want to spend your summer reading the Extinction Rebellion handbook, This is Not a Drill. A collection of essays by activists, environmental politi­cians and academics, it mixes scientific assessments, reports from the melting glaciers of the Himalayas, and everything you need to know about launching your own Extinction Rebellion – from getting arrested and going to jail to making art and influencing politicians.

Most bracing of all is the opening “Declaration of Rebellion” against the self-serving inertia of most governments: “We refuse to bequeath a dying planet to future generations by failing to act now. We act in peace, with ferocious love of these lands in our hearts. We act on behalf of life.”

It may just be the most important book you read this or any other summer.